The First Word: ‘Sanctuary Cities’ Ban is “All But Dead”

On this day — more reaction to Gov. Rick Perry’s non-campaign campaign for the White House; the House and Senate return to a pile of unfinished business as the clock on the special session winds down; House Speaker Straus kills the ‘anti-groping bill and calls it a “stunt;” the sanctuary cities bill appears to be on death’s door; and Joaquin Castro says he’ll challenge Lloyd Doggett.

Embry later reported that a deal to include the sanctuary cities ban language in a must pass fiscal matters bill had fallen apart, due to opposition from Senate budget negotiators, led by Sen. Robert Duncan.

As of deadline, the House State Affairs Committee is still scheduled to meet this morning and take up pending business (read: sanctuary cities, which was left pending the last time the committee met) and a joint resolution that would replace Rep. David Simpson’s anti-TSA/groping bill.

A weekend of intense lobbying against the bill — efforts that were backed by Bob Perry and Charles Butt, two of the biggest political donors in Texas — seems to have stalled earlier momentum to pass the bill.

Initially, the committee was supposed to vote on the ban last Friday, but that meeting was cancelled and rescheduled for today, just two days before the end of the special session. The compressed timeline would make difficult to pass SB9 as a separate bill.

***Meanwhile…

It looks like Rep. David Simpson’s anti-groping bill has been replaced by a resolution, authored by Rep. Linda Harper-Brown, that calls on federal officials to do more to protect civil liberties at airports.

House Speaker Joe Straus told reporters on Friday that he wouldn’t allow Simpson’s bill, which would have made it a crime for TSA officers to perform pat-down searches without probable cause, to come to the floor and called it a “stunt” that would make the House a national laughingstock.

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A Drilling Rig at Eagle Ford Shale - AP Photo/Pat Sullivan

***Shale Gas, The Next ‘Dot.Com’ Bubble?

The New York Times reports that energy industry insiders and regulators are raising concerns that the shale gas boom in Texas (and other states), has been predicated on overly optimistic estimates of the amount of gas they can get out of the ground and how much it will cost to extract it.

Natural gas companies have been placing enormous bets on the wells they are drilling, saying they will deliver big profits and provide a vast new source of energy for the United States.

In the e-mails, energy executives, industry lawyers, state geologists and market analysts voice skepticism about lofty forecasts and question whether companies are intentionally, and even illegally, overstating the productivity of their wells and the size of their reserves. Many of these e-mails also suggest a view that is in stark contrast to more bullish public comments made by the industry, in much the same way that insiders have raised doubts about previous financial bubbles.

“Money is pouring in” from investors even though shale gas is “inherently unprofitable,” an analyst from PNC Wealth Management, an investment company, wrote to a contractor in a February e-mail. “Reminds you of dot-coms.”

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A former Enron executive wrote in 2009 while working at an energy company: “I wonder when they will start telling people these wells are just not what they thought they were going to be?” He added that the behavior of shale gas companies reminded him of what he saw when he worked at Enron.

Production data, provided by companies to state regulators and reviewed by The Times, show that many wells are not performing as the industry expected. In three major shale formations — the Barnett in Texas, the Haynesville in East Texas and Louisiana and the Fayetteville, across Arkansas — less than 20 percent of the area heralded by companies as productive is emerging as likely to be profitable under current market conditions, according to the data and industry analysts.

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Below the fold — ‘The Roundup’ gets up to speed on all the latest stories about Gov. Rick Perry’s non-campaign campaign; featured in ‘The Clips,’ the fight over water spreads to oil in West Texas and the Houston Chronicle’s Patti Hart writes about statehouse hypocrisy; in ‘EXTRA!’ New York legalizes gay marriage, CJ and Toby talk about the debt ceiling.

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***The Roundup

Cameron Todd Willingham - Photo courtesy of the Willingham fami

- The Chicago Tribune reports that the Cameron Todd Willingham case, a story that the paper played a significant role in bringing to light, may come to haunt Perry during any possible presidential campaign.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has presided over 231 executions, more than any governor in the death penalty’s modern history. If he runs for president, one of those executions may become a campaign issue — a case involving questions of whether he allowed an innocent man to be put to death, then tried to scuttle a state commission’s investigation into the matter.

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“There’s something there, but to my mind it’s not going to be Willingham or the death penalty alone,” said James Henson, who teaches government at the University of Texas and is the director of the Texas Politics Project. “But with something else, it may get voters to take a longer and more critical look at Perry.”

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, agreed. If Perry runs, he said, opponents and the media will explore the issue and, in conjunction with other issues, it could become a problem for Perry.

“One inevitable consequence of actually running for president, everything a candidate thinks is closed is opened again. He dealt with it in the state, but he really never dealt with it in the national scene,” said Sabato. “In a general election, it’ll be an issue.”

Willingham was executed by lethal injection after being convicted of setting a fire that killed his three daughters before Christmas 1991. But his case and the ensuing controversy frame the death penalty in a new way: whether Perry used his power as governor to try to dodge responsibility for presiding over the execution of a potentially innocent man.

French cuffs and cowboy boots are, like sauerkraut ice cream, an eclectic combination, but Perry, who wears both, is a potentially potent candidate for the Republican presidential nomination because his political creed is uneclectic, matching that of the Republican nominating electorate. He was a “10th Amendment conservative” (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people”) before the Tea Party appeared. And before Barack Obama’s statism — especially Obamacare’s individual mandate — catalyzed concern for the American project of limited government.

Social issues, especially abortion, are gateways to the Republican nominating electorate: In today’s climate of economic fear, a candidate’s positions on social issues will not be decisive with his electorate — but they can be disqualifying. Perry — an evangelical Christian, like most Republican participants in Iowa’s caucuses and the South Carolina primary — emphatically qualifies.

- And a closer look at the Register’s polling numbers shows that Perry has a (+35) favorability rating. As always, it’s important to point out that polls give us a representative snapshot of how an electorate feels at a given time. If the opinions of the electorate shift, the polling will shift.

Plastic-lined pits holding millions of gallons of blue-green water are tucked away in fields chock-full of withering mesquite trees.On the banks of one of the larger man-made lakes, a lone green plant stands in stark contrast to the arid terrain that surrounds its artificial habitat. After the driest eight-month period in the state’s recorded history, this barren ranch land has become inhospitable to even the most drought-resistant vegetation.

So where, amid the severe dry spell, did all this pristine water come from?

The query probably would not have been raised in non-drought times in this oil-friendly community.

As West Texas’ reservoirs run dry, cities scour the region for their next water supply and farmers become more desperate for rainfall, oil companies here and elsewhere are pumping millions of gallons of freshwater from underground aquifers.

One pit in northern Crockett County contains enough to sustain a city of 100,000 for a day.

- The Express-News’ Brian Chasnoff reports that state Rep. Joaquin Castro, brother of the current San Antonio mayor and a rising star in Texas Democratic politics, will challenge Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who was targeted by Republicans again in redistricting.

Congressional District 35 is one of four new seats in Texas spawned from the state’s growth in the past decade. But the district’s boundaries could change as the GOP-drawn map faces legal challenges: Democrats say it ignores electoral gains by Hispanics, who account for 65 percent of the state’s population growth.

“This district is a blessing in disguise,” Castro, a Democrat, said, “because it would be among the few congressional districts in our nation that link two major American cities that are both in the top 15 in size and population.”

Castro’s decision to run pits him against U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Austin, a seasoned, liberal congressman targeted for political extinction by Republicans. Solidly Democratic and Hispanic, the new district is part of a Republican plan to fracture Travis County into five districts and redraw archenemy Doggett into Republican turf that stretches into the Hill Country.

The ruling Republicans, still corralled in Austin, seem to have forgotten in their haste to make Texas more like Arizona that fringe behavior is bad for business.

In truth, it’s bad, period. So it’s disappointing to see such backward thinking gain traction inside our city limits. People in San Antonio know better.

Yet it was Sen. Jeff Wentworth‘s paid advertisement in the Express-News last Sunday that painted a target on his colleague, Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, for suggesting in an earlier op-ed piece that efforts by Republicans to force through a so-called “sanctuary cities” bill was anti-Hispanic.

The issue dominating the special session of the Legislature boils down to this: Should agents of the government, under the guise of national security, have widespread authority to deprive people of their liberty and dignity by subjecting them to abusive and humiliating screening?

The Texas Legislature, demonstrating an amazing capacity for situational ethics, has arrived at its answer: it depends. Are you talking about the invasive tactics employed by some power-drunk agents of the Transportation Security Administration? Or the rogue harassment of Hispanics at the hands of a few Texas law enforcement officials suspicious about someone’s immigration status?

The degree to which the Legislature is willing to defend your civil liberties apparently hinges on whether you’ve got a frequent flier card in your wallet — and the pigmentation of your skin.